


The hand you reach out is empty, as mine is

by levendis



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angsty Schmoop, Anxiety, Awkward Conversations, F/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension, cuddlecore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-13 01:40:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7133354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ask a question, get an answer. Disclaimer: written before Bill was confirmed to be a lesbian</p>
            </blockquote>





	The hand you reach out is empty, as mine is

 

Today on _Reasons Why You Run Until You Feel Like You’re Gonna Puke_ : robots. Again. Bill wobbled her way down the console room steps, willing her lungs to start working again. “How. How many murderous races of robots are there in the universe, anyway?”

“A bunch,” the Doctor said, slamming the door shut behind him. Giving the last straggling kill-bot a jaunty wave before it geared up into explosion mode.

“Hah,” she said, still breathing heavily. “Hah hah. Why? I mean. How does that happen even once, let alone ‘a bunch’? This is real life, not a _Terminator_ movie.”

“It just - it does. Okay?” He sighed, rubbing his temples, smearing the soot and sweat around.

That was a shit answer, and she was about to explain precisely how, once she found the energy. But he pulled his standard 'whoops sorry’ expression, which blurred into something sterner, the hamster-wheel in his brain clearly spinning. He stepped forward, grasped her firmly by the shoulders.

“Oh, god, you’ve got Lecture Face on, can we skip it? Please, just this once. I’m so tired.”

“This isn’t my Lecture Face,” he said, twirling her around. “This is my I’m About to Do Something Ill-Advised to Solve a Minor Short-Term Problem, face.”

She heard him unzip her backpack and start rummaging through it. “Looks pretty much the same.”

He gave a disapproving huff. But they did, though, they did look identical, that was a fact. “What’s this?”

“What’s what.” She winced, praying it wasn’t anything that would lead to an awkward conversation. Well, more awkward than a conversation involving her tended to be, anyway.

“This.” He dangled something over her head, bopping her on the nose.

For fuck’s sake. “It’s bloody hand-sanitizer, right? What are you doing, anyway? Get - get off, shoo.” She twisted away from him, emphatically zipping her bag back up.

He stood there looking vaguely apologetic, hands raised in supplication, one hand clutching her tablet computer like he only vaguely understood what it was for.

“If you break that-”

“Not gonna break it.” He dug his sonic screwdriver out of his coat pocket and pointed it at the tablet.

“Looks like you might be breaking it.”

He glared up at her, scowl turned slightly demonic (in a goofy kind of way) by the light of the screwdriver. “I’m making it better. Please don’t ask how.”

Her turn now to look vaguely apologetic. “It’s just that I watched you blow up a robot with that thing about an hour ago.”

“Fair enough.” With one last flourish, he flicked the screwdriver off, tucked it back into his pocket, and handed her the tablet.

She took it gingerly - really, the amount of things that she’d seen go boom in the past 24 hours, a little wariness was perfectly reasonable - and turned it on. Everything seemed in order. One new icon on the home screen, though. Bunch of circles like the symbols on the top spinny-bit of the TARDIS console. “You installed an app.”

He was bouncing on his heels, grinning. “Yeah! Well. Sort of. Open it, go on.” He bounded behind her, leaning over her shoulder to watch.

“Is it. Space-Google?” Search bar, magnifying glass icon, very Web 1.0.

“It’s a direct connection to the TARDIS data banks. Which in turn are connected to an incomprehensibly vast collection of libraries and databases all across the universe. Not to mention everything she’s picked up over the past 3,000 years we’ve been traveling together.”

Everything. All the knowledge, ever, in her bargain-model tablet from 2013. It wasn’t even slightly sinking in. She typed “cat” into the search bar; the first result looked like a vlog by a, um. Cat-person. “You said you were 2,000 years old.”

He laughed, a soft, self-deprecating thing. “Well. What’s a millennia between friends.”

“Thanks,” she said, turning her head towards his. Oh, wow, they were close, like really close together, that was - okay.

“You’re welcome.” He reached around her to swipe through the search results. “The First Great Feline Empire, that’s an epic. Or, hey, this one, this is a good one.”

They stood there for a while, watching a video of kittens climbing in and out of cardboard boxes.

 

* * *

 

The corridor that led to her room on the TARDIS also led to other corridors, which led to more corridors. She took walks, sometimes, when the antsy feeling got to be too much, or she was bored, or felt like indulging in the background radiation of her excitement about _living in a damn spaceship._ Besides, not like she was trespassing, or anything. This was - kind of her place too, now.

There was a library and a swimming pool and a room filled with butterflies. Staircases that went down and down and down. She got lost, as much as the TARDIS seemed willing to allow, snapping her back after an hour or two of wandering. A room with an entire train, rooms too thick with vegetation to get past the doorway. Besides, if she did get properly lost, the Doctor could probably do a scan or whatever, like on _Star Trek._ She turned the GPS on on her tablet, though, just in case.

There were rooms with bunkbeds and vanities, littered with personal effects. Hair brushes, sketchbooks, a cardigan once. She wasn’t the first, then. The first, what d'you call, traveller, to have stayed here. There was a section on her Future-Google app called 'Internal Data’ and it was all sorts of jumbled, but she got the gist. And the names. So, so many names. She scrolled down, and down, sitting on the pretty floral sheets neatly covering the four-poster princess bed, the bed someone like her had slept in once. She felt slightly dizzy just long enough to feel even dizzier as the room fell apart around her.

Sitting on her own bed, now. A kind of cooing noise coming from nowhere, everywhere; she lived in a spaceship that talked to her, apparently. She pulled her legs up beneath her and hunched over the tablet, scrolling back up to the top of the list of names. Start from the very beginning, a very good place to start.

 

* * *

 

She had all this information, this overwhelming pile of facts. The litany of names, all the people this stranger had known, the friends he’d had, and then lost. Always, inevitably, in one way or another, lost. And then moved on as fast as he could, seemed like. On to the next one. Thousands of years of this shit. Never settling down, never committing.

 

And she’d read some of the entries on Gallifrey, as well. She’d read enough to get the general idea.

 

Late night, or the approximation of it - outside of linear time, night apparently is whatever you want it to be - after a few hours of not sleeping, just poking at that dumb tablet, she rolled out of bed. Tugged a hoodie on, a pair of slippers she didn’t recognize, and shuffled through the hallways until she found a familiar room. The library, dark except for one bright blaring light, in the corner.

The Doctor was sitting on an incongrously ugly couch, deeply imbedded in a paperback novel. Crime, looked like. She didn’t bother trying to sneak up on him, but succeeded anyway: he jumped, just a touch, when she cleared her throat.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hiya,” he said.

She scuffed her borrowed slippers on the carpet, trying to collect all the thoughts that had been in perfect alignment on the way over. What had she meant to say? Right, right. Okay.

“I have a mate who lived in his car for a while. This bright-green 2005 Ford Fiesta. Used to park overnight in the lot outside Tesco’s. Had a little hotplate that plugged into the cigarette lighter, it’s a wonder he didn’t set himself on fire.”

“The TARDIS is somewhat larger and better-appointed than a budget motor vehicle.”

“I let him use my shower a few times,” she continued, gracefully ignoring his snark. “Offered the couch, but he never accepted. Too proud, maybe. Or he didn’t want to be a burden. Or - I dunno.” She flopped down next to him, turning the tablet over in her hands before dropping it on the side table. Trying to find something to do with her hands, fiddling with the tweedy couch cushion at her sides. “When was the last time you had a place to go home to?”

He stiffened, dogeared a page in his book and set it down between them. His hand almost, not quite, touching hers. “This is my home. And besides, who needs a fixed address? All that boring domestic nonsense. Mowing the lawn and taking out the trash and cleaning the lightbulbs. Day in, day out, doing nothing of importance while there’s a whole universe out there to see. Pfft, no, not for me, no sir.”

That was an incredibly weak smile he was making, but she let it slide. “Yeah. Yeah, fair enough.”

Like a switch being flipped, the mask back on, he jumped up. Grabbed her hands and pulled her off the couch. “Like this, right here. This is boring domestic nonsense, and it’s a crying shame, because there’s a fireworks display in New Texas that won’t watch itself. C'mon. _C'mon._ ”

 

* * *

 

(Things blowing up, again, though in a nicer way this time. They put a blanket down on a hill covered with other blankets, other people. Thermos of tea and a bag of liquorice-flavored marshmallows, which she declined with an exaggerated grimace. The whine and crackle and thank-fuck-she-didn’t-have-PTSD-yet booms, lights glittering and falling and fading away.

She leaned back, nudged at him til he wrapped his arm around her, leaving one hand free to dig out fistfuls of reprehensibly gross sugar lumps. Seriously, he had revolting taste in everything, and she didn’t know what they taught you at Time-Travel University but marshmallows really weren't an acceptable meal.)

 

* * *

 

Did you know that dolphins create their own parliament in 3045? Bill did. Also: there are 2,083,791,087,239 McDonald’s franchises in the universe by the 40th century. Cricket remains popular until the mid 26th century, when a law is passed banning the recreational use of rocket launchers.

“You’re being extra-creepy today,” she said, thwipping the bookmark icon on an article about the disco revival of 2075 and setting the tablet on the nightstand, after the Doctor had been silently looming for well over a minute.

“Home isn’t a place,” he said quietly. Leaning in the doorway, backlit, looking odd and angular. “It’s a…a feeling. A person. People, it…”

He didn’t visit his friends much, though. If at all. He hardly ever went back after he’d left. Or they left. She’d done a Space-Google, it was all right there. Not really something she should bring up. She didn’t bring it up. Just made a noncommittal 'hmm’ sort of noise, and nodded at the armchair. And then nodded again, more emphatically, until he shuffled in, scratching at the back of his neck.

He folded himself up and deposited his body into the chair like he didn’t quite know how furniture worked. Biting at his thumb, alternating between staring at her and glancing wildly around the room.

At one point she’d have assumed this was awkward due to this being her bedroom, and her lying on the bed, in her pj’s. Not that a five-year-old tank top, Spiderman boxers, and mismatched socks were the height of erotic lingerie, but it was still a situation that with most anyone else would have some sort of sexual tension attached. He wasn’t about that, didn’t seem to get it, she knew that now.

She pulled her knees up to her chin, picked at the hole in the toe of her left sock. “So I’m, uh, I’m 'people’ now, I guess.”

“Don’t let it get to your head.”

“I got married to a queen today, had lunch with George Clinton yesterday, d'you really think being your…people, is the greatest honor I’ve ever received?” It kind of was, though. He didn’t need to know that.

He laughed, and slid out of the chair, flinging himself upright and then face-down onto the bed.

“Did you really just put your dirty boots on my duvet?”

“It’s my duvet,” he said.

“Take the boots off. I mean ideally you’d take-” don’t say it, don’t say 'take your clothes off’ - “your coat off as well, because who knows where that’s been, but. No shoes in bed.”

“Yes ma'am,” he said, and then froze, a strange look on his face. Then carefully, slowly unlaced his boots, pulling them off and lining them up neatly on the floor at the foot of the bed. His coat, as well, slid off and dropped unceremoniously on top of the boots.

 _He’s a 5,000-year-old asexual alien_ , she reminded herself, staring at the tense, narrow line of his back. _Please, Compulsive Thoughts, not today._ He settled back down next to her, thankfully oblivious, arms folded over his chest.

“You lie down weirdly,” she said, scooting closer.

“What does that even mean?”

“And are those the only clothes you own? D'you not have pajamas? Do Time Lords wear pajamas?”

He sighed. “This is why I fixed your enormous telephone. Look it up.”

“It’s a tablet computer, and I don’t wanna look it up. I want you to tell me.” Looking at the ceiling, reaching over to pry his hand out of that stiff self-hug, weaving her fingers between his, squeezing just a bit. “It’s called a conversation, we have those on Earth. I can send you an article about it.”

“Thank you for the offer, I appreciate it. And no, not in the plaid-flannel sense. Nightgowns, mostly, made of a horribly puritanical fabric. Sleep isn’t a huge concern. By the time you make Time Lord, they’ve stripped everything out of your biology that prevents you from being as productive as possible.”

“So you don’t sleep?” That’d explain some things.

“I can if I want to. Don’t normally want to. Anyway…”

She yawned and curled up on her side, still holding his hand. Because she was human, and humans slept, and there was nothing wrong with that, thank you Mr. Genetically Enhanced. He kept talking, just more quietly, now. Like a kind of white-noise machine. Setting Four, Incoherent Scottish Burble. She drifted off as he started in on the social, physical, and mental importance of proper footwear. Correct fit and a nonslip sole.

(“’m still listening,” she mumbled, throwing her arm over his waist. She was not still listening. He kept talking, though.)


End file.
